What do I think or get upto as Oracle Professional, UKOUG Board Member, ACE Director?
The intention is not to explain everything in detail but to link to existing information that may be of interest.

Monday, 26 September 2016

My OOW16 - Paas 4 SaaS

I gave my overall thoughts about the messages and where I think Oracle are in another post, and I said important to me is where PaaS, Platform as a Service, is going. The development tools part of the Oracle offering.There was lots of PaaS content at the ACE Director Briefings and much more at OOW itself. They talked about delivering the PaaS portfolio in suites, grouping together products that you might want to use together. I was discussing this with someone after the event and we were unclear on pricing, the idea of grouping them together makes sense but only if you can still purchase individually and at a discount for the whole group. OOW isn't specifically about pricing but we need to know.Paas4SaaS is my area, using PaaS to extend the cloud applications. I think there are 4 scenarios where this can be considered:

Where a customer wants a bespoke solution to a business need, this is really a stand alone PaaS application but they may want master data from their Oracle Cloud Apps.

Where a customer has an end to end Oracle strategy and has gaps in their IT estate

An EBS customer looking to move to Cloud who needs to do something with their portfolio of customisations

Extending the SaaS solution with apps that can be sold to multiple customers through the Oracle MarketPlace

As well as the PoC Certus did with eProseed last year we are now working on an app for Immunisation programs and we talked about this at our session on the Sunday and showed our approach to visitors to the UX expo on the Monday. I have another article on Paas4SaaS in the latest Oracle Scene.

I have also been working with the Application Builder Cloud Service team, testing the Citizen Developer offering and the new APIs for HCM. On my first day at HQ I met with the ERP team and talked about needing APIs for ERP. I am not after financial APIs (yet) but would like the master data information like Customers and Suppliers.

In the run up to OOW, I was contacted by the ABCS product management team and asked if I would like to give a quote for them on ABCS to use in an OOW press release. I was happy to do this although I later learned it was for ABCS within a wider 'suite' called Project Visual Code that Larry Ellison announced at his keynote. The Citizen Developer description I didn't really like has been replaced by Low Code, and I am not sure I like that any better but it is more suitable. I need to spend some more time working with this and let you know more about it, but in the meantime follow Luc Bors, also from eProseed. Luc is much closer to the technical side than I am and explains it all beautifully.

Oracle are really pushing PaaS and I attended an executive partner round table at the Oracle offices in the city. I have never been there before and it felt odd seeing the employees who work in San Francisco but that were not at the conference.

I felt the main messages from the round table were that messages are not clear for the on premise versions of the Cloud products. It is OK new features being added to Cloud first but where a customer has invested on premise they need to know the roadmaps for them. Oracle seemed clear they would deliver enhancements on premise and agreed to include on premise in their roadmaps.

I then rushed across town to make a video with Oracle about the PaaS4SaaS work we are looking at in Certus. This video will be aimed at Oracle internally as well as customers.

PaaS has a long way to go but I am confident it will give more and more value to customers.